Month: October 2009

You see my wife and I had plans Saturday night (I know, can you belive it!) with a few other couples and we were all meeting up North of the city at a Japanese restaurant.

After finding the address – and determining that it was very close to my office, I decided I could find it no problem, but since I did not recognize the name, I wanted to see view of the restaurant from the street.

So cleverly my wife went to Google Street View.

This is what we got…

Nice, eh? If you look closely through the windows of the bus you can see the restaurant… Who am I trying to kid. No you can’t.

So imagine being the company who directs people to their URL and then from there to this application in order to see where they are located only to find out that a giant fucking TTC bus is blocking the entire view.

That was a few lines from the Barenaked Ladies children’s song entitled, “Raisins”. My kids, and wife, love that song. It is rather clever and catchy.

But this post is not about the Barenaked Ladies – even though merely typing the tags, “barenaked” and “ladies” should result in a plethora of hits from perverts – but rather this post is about raisins.

You see this morning my son was completely bonkers. So my wife and I tracked back to find out why. We figured it out and we blame raisins. Let me back-track and explain…

At over 8 months pregnant, my wife has mid-wife appointments every 2 weeks for now and I hate missing these appointments. Forget being seen as a good husband for going – that’s so not why I go, but rather I live with her and I want to be on top of every feeling, issue or complaint she has. With babies and pregnant woman, you can never be too prepared. So I joined her for her late afternoon appointment with our youngest boy, while my almost 5-year-old (we call him Linus because he is attached to a blankie) was picked up form school by Gramma and off to dinner they went.

So the boys usually wind up in bed around 7-7:30pm but last night we all met in the driveway around 7:30 and there was Linus with a teeny tiny box of raisins.

Looks something like this;

These are Sun-Maid raisins, not Sun-Kist, and if you google “sun-kist raisins” you are taken to Sun-Kist’s FAQ page in which they explain that they do not make raisins, and if you’re looking for them, you’ll need to go to the Sun-Maid website.

He also had 4 others in a ziploc bag.

Thinking nothing about it, we let the boys finish their raisins, then we got them ready for bed…

But Linus didn’t sleep well. He came into our room during the night a few times, tossed, turned and eventually woke up really early (before 6am), woke up his mummy and once downstairs for breakfast – looking very tired – was still really crazy and bouncing around the house.

Then my soon to be nutritionist wife did some research and found this following fact;

One box of raisins contains 20g of sugar. One Aero chocolate bar contains 24g of sugar. Essentially, Linus ate almost 3 1/2 chocolate bars worth of sugar before bed. No wonder he was crazy. My son is not good on sugar. Putting aside the fact that raisins are quite gummy and as a result the natural sugars stick to kids teeth and can contribute to cavities, I think of raisins in a totally new light!

Like this:

So it looks like the lawyer for Richard Heene, the man accused of perpetrating the balloon boy hoax to promote a reality show will be charged by police after emails showed that he had been planning this even for a couple months.

In case you live in a bubble, or without TV, all the major TV stations carried this drama on live television to millions of viewers worldwide. The alleged stunt temporarily shut down Denver International Airport, and the National Guard provided two helicopters in an attempt to rescue 6-year-old Falcon Heene, who was believed to be inside the flying-saucer shaped homemade balloon that hurtled more than 50 miles across two counties.

Here is the image broadcast across the world…

Crap. That’s not it.

Oh yeah. He was supposed to be floating away in this tin-foil piece of shit.

So when the balloon landed without the boy, officials thought he had fallen out and began the grim search for his body… On live TV no less. But as it turns out, this was nothing more than a marketing ploy by the Heenes, this odd American family who met in acting school in Hollywood and have appeared on ABC’s reality show “Wife Swap.”

So essentially, the Heene family got what they wanted… Or what they thought they wanted. They got the attention of the masses but with that “fame” comes the intense investigation into their private lives, including reporters trying to find out why they did this, what they had hoped to gain, who knew about it, and there has even been investigation into their private lives and into them as people. It has been very overwhelming for a family that just wanted to be famous. But they deserved it.

The gig was up when investigators were able to get a good look at the “flying saucer” and they were able to determine that the thin mylar balloon was covered with tinfoil and held together with duct tape, and would not have been able to launch with the 37-pound-boy inside.

Then other parts of their “story” started to come apart, including whether their 6-year-old boy, oddly named “Falcon”, had been hiding in the rafters of the family’s garage during an intense five-hour search, or in their attack, turned out to not be true, “For all we know he may have been two blocks down the road playing on the swing in the city park,” the sheriff said. This lie came to light when the boy turned to his dad during a CNN interview on Thursday and said what sounded like “you had said we did this for a show” when asked why he didn’t come out of his hiding place.

The sheriff also said that all three of the Heenes’ sons knew of the hoax, but likely won’t face charges because of their ages. The oldest son is 10. One of the boys told investigators he saw his brother get in the balloon’s box before it launched. Clearly a lie too.

Richard Heene, a 48-year-old storm chaser, inventor, wack-job, and self-described amateur scientist, has a high school education and most recently earned a living by laying tile. Police records show that they have responded to the Heene house at least twice in the past year, including a possible domestic violence incident in February. No charges were ever filed, although officials did try to persuade Mayumi Heene, 45, to go to a safe house, but she declined.

On the simply horrible “reality” TV show “Wife Swap,” Heene was portrayed as erratic, at one point throwing a glass of milk on a participant on the program.

The sheriff said the children were still with the parents Sunday and that child protective services had been contacted to investigate their well-being.

A pet peeve is a minor annoyance that is particularly annoying to me, to a greater degree than others may find it. Examples may be poor table manners, sloppy kitchen hygiene, smoking, grammatical errors in written passages, inconsiderate driving or lazy co-workers, and loud gum smacking.

Here they are;

13. Stupid People

12. People who throw garbage out of the windows of their car while driving

11. Grafitti – Hey, you with that paint can who sprayed my house at 2 in the morning. I’m going to follow you home and spray pain my stupid-ass gang logo on your house, room and clothes. How much would you like that?!?

10. People who chew with their mouth open

9. Cigarette butt flickers. They toss them everywhere and never put them out. Probably because it’s so fucking cool…

8. Drivers who don’t use their turn signals. I always want to yell, “Hey doofus… It’s called an indicator! Are you that inconsiderate that you don’t feel like indicating your intentions…” Then I whip out my dart-gun and flatten all four of their tires, driving away smiling and feeling great.

7. Woman who wear low cut clothes, and a big, flashy piece of jewellery right in the cleavage, so if you look at the jewellery, they think you’re a pervert… This has NEVER happened to me… I just hear it’s a big problem.

6. Texting in work meetings… Really rude. Can be problematic for those who are texting, especially if you are the boss.

5. People who cannot pick their feet up when they walk. My son did this in the summer and completely wore out the heels of his shoes.

4. Spitters… UGH. Oh, please can I now walk on your hork…

3. Inviting people over to your house for holidays and parties, meals and playdates but never getting invited anywhere by them…

2. People who have no idea what “personal space” is

1. Empty coffee cups in movies or TV shows. You know they are empty by the way the actor’s swing them around or when they make that empty-cup-sound once they are put down on a counter. I hate that!!! Hire someone if you have to, whose job it is to fill up the fucking cups. Grrr, that pisses me off.

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